They aren’t punishing you. Punishing would be no chance to change gear, like they were going to do originally.
Your options are to choose your traits more wisely so you don’t have to change constantly, be more diligent about WHEN you change so the cost doesn’t get out of control, or collect multiple items like the system is meant to encourage anyway.
Even with how limited collection is now, I have 10+ items in my bags with little effort.

Even with all this known, they are also nerfing the cost build up in 8.1 further. Not exactly sure what the change is, but I know a change is coming.

Realistically, all but the outer rings are the only thing you need to be concerned with, and you don’t need to be perfectly min/maxed for most of the content you’d be considering switching for anyway.
The traits, sadly, are just not that important to be that worried about them that you are changing them a dozen times a week.

Yeah, this is actually another reason I despise the loss of the Artifact system. It was -incredibly- useful to have access to offspec weapons to be able to swap for tank, healing, or DPS with only minor loss due to the AP issues.

Sure, you couldn’t really keep all 3 trained all the time, but especially once you’d unlocked the final talent points, it was very handy to give an extra outlet for the AP tokens.

Instead, we have the Azerite gear with the lackluster talents, and have to fight and pray for offspec luck to be able to assist with other roles. It’s doubly ironic since people gripe about the lack of healers and tanks in LFD/LFR situations, and Blizzard removed our ability to be more useful to the group.

I just keep a separate set for my other spec(s) since the pieces tend to be better for one or the other. So while I may be a little worse since I’m not perfectly itemized for one, once I organized things I had no issues switching roles.

At least I don’t have to have a giant pile of items to swap to like I did in the past.

I’m fine with keeping multiple sets for different specs. The problem is how non-user friendly this azerite system is for us hybrids. Every time a new azerite piece drops I did a little inside because it means parking myself infront of the scrapper for an hour, opening up three Wowhead tabs and fumbling through my bags trying to figure which combination of these stupid traits would be optimum for each spec while keeping reforging costs at a minimum.

Part of it is a UI problem I guess, but the nature of this azerite system itself is just so incredibly frustrating that I can’t believe it made its way into an actual video game.

“Could be worse” feels like a weird stance to take. With so much emphasis on armor, with Azerite being what it is, wouldn’t it make much more sense to try to ease the agony of having to keep acquiring multiple armor sets just to do a job?

i agree with astrae, i love wow and play it all the time, azurite is just something i have to deal with in order to play wow though and i wish this system could just be reverted to items with normal stats, another thing that makes the azurite progressing upsetting is that once u have alts, its hard to maintain the AP farm because of time requirements and so i just find myself falling behind and not wanting to even play them because it would make my main lack the end tier traits or ilvl

Thanks for responding.
Why would blizz want us to farm 2 or more sets of gear. It creating clutter within the data. Would it not just be more efficient to have a gear change with your spec. What I trying to understand is why increasing gold every time, what is the point creating a clear deterrent? Why is Blizz against respecting?

So you want your guild tank to take your beating for you in raids and then he can go F him/herself after the raid when he’s gotta dps for world quests after they’re done serving the guild? It’s not exactly fun to always tank/heal for everybody, I can attest to that - that’s why I picked a pure this expansion. It should be super easy for any player willing to take one for the team to be able to do that, don’t you think?

This has become less of an issue for me as I’ve been getting more Azerite pieces, I still feel the rate at which we get them could be increased a bit but it has definitely gotten better.

One change I’d really like to see however is just a QoL thing: Please just let me select azerite traits regardless of what spec I’m currently in… Whenever I’m sorting my gear sets or I get a new azerite piece that is good for my off-spec it’s just very annoying having to swap specs just to be able to pick that trait, what I mean is please just let me pick a Holy/Shadow trait when I’m specced as Disc, we (the players) understand that trait is not for our active spec but we often want to pick it for off-spec.

As for the changes coming in 8.1 where M+ will drop currency to ‘buy’ the azerite pieces you want, I have yet to test it but from a first impression based on what I’ve read about how long it takes to gather enough resources to buy a piece it sounds a bit slow, from what I’ve heard it’s 2-3 weeks for a random piece OR 5 to 6 for a specific one, I think those timeline would be alright if they were running in parallel (so 2-3 weeks for a random one AND you can buy a specific one every 4 to 6 weeks).

I don’t understand how people at this point don’t have at least enough gear for each of their specs. Having to carry a 2nd set is not a new thing, and you’re offered the option of not having to spare a few slots on your gigantic bags by respeccing the azerite traits, if that’s not your jam. Convenience comes at a gold cost, always has. You’re not being ‘punished’, you’re turning yourself into a victim.